Deciding to Exit After 2 Years of Ownership

Yes. But I will never forget that. Obviously. So good memories. The team at Aspen HR recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers Entitled A New CEO's Guide to Human Resources. It lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition into CEO and owner of the business you bought.

The link to download it is in the show notes. Aspen is a professional employer organization or PEO run by a searcher for searchers. Search fund veteran Mark Sinatra runs the company which provides HR compliance, flawless payroll, Fortune 500 caliber benefits and HR due diligence support for your acquisition, all for.

Is it SMB Boot Camp or SM Boot Camp? That's a great question. We'll go with one B.

SM Boot Camp. Yeah. Okay. It what does it look like today? I know that you launched an online component to it or version of it. Take give us a picture of what it looks like today, three plus years later. Yeah.

So just over four years from our first cohort, which was in July of 2021. Ironically, one month later, we acquired a business called West Florida Fence and that was the start of PSG. So it's a, it's a fond period of time for me that, that stretch summer of 2021, uh, SM boot camp now has had, I'm gonna get this wrong.

It's 17 cohorts. We've had over 300 alumni come through really. So I have seen a lot, I have the benefit of having seen a lot. Very fortunate to see that the reasons for doing it are still the same.

I have fun. I feel like I get to share all of the lessons with people who have a chance to change their life the way ETA did for me. ETA kind of took me out of a really tough career spot I was in. So I still get to pay it forward.

I still get to invest in great people. I think I just invested in a, a pair of alumni that came to boot camp together or separately partnered and then went, went home, acquired a business and I'm fortunate enough to be on their cap table. So that's a perfect example.

And then I have not done this as much, but I have had the chance to meet people who don't end up buying, but they end up wanting to partner or work together in one form or another. And Jack ended up being a great story of kind of both of those things. But boot camp we run live.

That's still our core, most popular program is the three day live in person in Tampa. Cohorts of 20 people. We bring our deal team.

SM Bootcamp has a team of five now. So it's a real group of professionals. Investment banking, private equity.